Hammer Museum

Kambon, born Mark Teemer in Sacramento in 1946, is a former Marine, Black Panther, and art professor.

In 2023, at the age of 77, he won the prestigious Moan Award, the top prize given by the Hammer Museum, for his participation in their biennial show, Made in L.A. After that, a selection of Kambon's works were presented in a solo show in Beverly Hills at the celebrated Mark Selwyn Gallery.

This May, I had a chance to visit them there, where I learned that his technique is a version of Japanese Raku, which causes smoke to interact with glaze in unpredictable ways.

The results in this case are intricate, surprising, storytelling pieces that focus on suppressed histories of rebellion, vengeance, and rescue.

I visited Kambon in his studio in Long Beach earlier this year, in a warehouse space with his dogs and kilns out back.

The place was overflowing and alive with his work.

[upbeat music] Here's a clip from the documentary produced by the Hammer Museum on Kambon's life, Akinsanya Kambon: The Hero Avenges.

[gentle music]

We have the Broad downtown, which is the newest.

We have the Hammer Museum over in Westwood by UCLA.

A little older, we have the Getty Center and the Getty Villa, which is, you know, J. Paul Getty, notoriously nice guy, who collected a lot of art and has these two big museums.

And so it is very much in line with that, with...

When I reflect back on our 50th year anniversary of Ms.

Magazine and time that I spent with Gloria then and before and in the period since, when we were doing our book tour together, time and again, something that struck me, whether it was that politics and prose in Washington, DC, the Hammer Museum in SoCal or other parts of the country where we went and we talked about the book and we had hundreds of people showing up.

One of the things that struck me was how many people came up and said that their mother was born in another country and how their mother kept Ms.

Magazine in the house.

She's an Egyptian feminist, a writer, and activist, and counted Steinem as a close friend.

We met in October of 2011 at the Hammer Museum.

It was the first time we met, and the museum brought us together to speak on stage about feminism in general, focusing on the revolution in Egypt earlier that year.

Yeah, so this was the Arab Spring chapter, 2011.

There's not a lot of, like, interactive displays.

So if you're thinking, you know, it's not like the Hammer Museum, which is another museum Gary forgot to mention.

It's not like the Children's Museum.

There's not a lot of, like, interactive hands-on things that you're going to get to do.

Yeah.

Well, I just love the city and there's so many, I was just driving on the, where was I going? I was going to the, I was going actually to this premiere at the Hammer Museum and I was coming from Burbank and you kind of come over the hill coming down the 101.

I ended up going a different way.

I can't remember.

I'll get into it.

But it's the restaurant at the Hammer Museum that she kind of oversees in a way.

Maybe she...

I want to

Go ahead.

Okay, so Lulu's been open for almost five years.

Where? At the Hammer Museum in the courtyard on the second floor.

Right.

Please look into the Resnick's.

Katie and I just went to the Hammer Museum.

They've got a big, I think they're like called the Resnick room or something.

I go into the museum and it's all of this like indigenous art and art.